The Impact of Color
on Your Marketing Efforts
AllegraDulles.com
Table of Contents
Executive Summary..................................... 1
Adding Color to Save Money...................... 2
Be Specific in Your Color Choices............... 3
What Kind of Response Do You Want?....... 4
What Do You Want Customers to Feel?....... 5
Put It Together for the Greatest Impact........ 6
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Section
1
Executive Summary
Ever noticed how happy people are when the sun shines? Nature’s colors are more vibrant and
vivid. Spirits are lifted, and senses are perked.
Now, just imagine the impact color could have on your advertising and marketing…especially
when your pieces are printed on the right papers to showcase that vivid color.
Rather than creating documents in just black and white, a pop of color draws attention to the
point you want to emphasize, whether that’s your logo, a sales promotion, a special offer, or a
callout box highlighting the main reasons a customer should do business with you.
Color can also be used to create a response in your potential clients. However, the way you add
color can make or break your marketing efforts. In this white paper, we’ll explore the ways color
can affect your marketing.
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2
Adding Color to Save Money
Using color adds such an impact in your pieces that its benefits far outweigh any possible extra
cost you may incur. And with the latest printing technology, we can help you create and print
pieces that will be affordable and effective.
In fact, using color in your marketing pieces makes those efforts 45% more effective than the
same materials in black and white. That means your investment in color will come back to you
many times over!
Now that you know the importance of using color, let’s talk about HOW to use it. Just adding
color doesn’t ensure that your pieces will pack a punch.
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3
Be Specific with Your Color Choices
In order to determine how to use color in your pieces, think about what you’re selling or
promoting.
-- Is it an event you’ve created in order to boost sales in general?
-- Or is it a campaign to boost name recognition?
-- Are you offering a new product, item, or service you want to announce to people?
-- Are you doing branding?
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4
What Kind of Response Do You Want?
Now that you’ve targeted what you’re trying to accomplish with this particular campaign, let’s
think about the response you’re trying to get from your marketing piece.
Researchers have explored the effects of color on people’s emotions and buying habits. Knowing
what colors elicit what types of emotions and responses will help you create the right marketing
pieces for your campaign.
● For example, are you trying to get potential customers to feel excited or passionate? Do you
want to create a sense of danger? Use red.
● Are you looking to elicit a feeling of happiness or warmth? Try yellow.
● Are safety, trust, and belonging important to your audience? Use blue.
● How about dignity or spirituality? Choose purple.
● Or is your main goal to create a sense of urgency to buy your product? Once again, the
answer is red
Ideally, we want to accomplish everything, but having a specific goal with each marketing piece
will help you achieve your goal step by step.
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5
What Do You Want Customers to Feel?
Knowing where to add the color is important, but so is picking the right color. Different colors
elicit different responses from people.
For instance, think about fast food restaurants. Most of them use vivid reds and oranges due to
the fact that those colors cause people to eat quickly and leave, which is what most fast food
restaurants want from their customers.
When you look at children’s products, you’ll often see large blocks of bright, primary colors.
These are the colors that attract children. According to surveys, almost 75% of pre-adolescent
children prefer purple to all other colors. With this in mind, it’s a good idea to incorporate purple
in your product, place of business, and marketing materials if your goal is to attract children.
These are just a couple of examples, but here are some basic responses from colors you may be
thinking of using:
● Red: appetite, excitement, strength, passion, speed, danger, masculine energy
-- Complementary colors used for balance: turquoise, green, blue
● Blue: trust, reliability, belonging, coolness, loyalty, authority, integrity, responsibility
-- Blue is good for promoting medical items, as well as health and wellness, technology,
cleanliness, masculine products, and feminine products.
-- Do not use blue with the food industry, as it does not typically occur in nature.
● Yellow: warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness, mental clarity, stimulates the logical
side of the brain
-- Be careful with yellow! It’s better used as an accent color due to its ability to cause anxiety,
apprehension, and confrontation.
-- Great to use for children’s products, leisure products, and entertainment businesses
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● Orange: playfulness, warmth, vibrance, risk-taking, informal, stimulating to the senses,
affordable, youthful
-- Orange is often used in cafés and bistros (related to conversation and spending money)
● Green: nature, health, healing, freshness, coolness, family, growth, self-reliance, abundance
-- Lime green creates anticipation as to what an offer can do for the reader. It also encourages
people to join social groups and satisfies their need to belong.
● Purple: royalty, spirituality, dignity, humanitarianism, mystery, unusualness and individuality,
creativity, inventiveness, wealth and extravagance, high quality or superior product, beauty
-- Purple is a great color for products related to women or children, but it also tends to appeal to
the younger generation of males and pre-adolescents.
-- Works well with gold, taupe, turquoise, jade green, deep red, magenta, and yellow. Orange and
purple make a more contemporary look.
-- This is said to be a color that helps develop the imagination.
● Pink: soft, sweet, nurturing, security, feminine energy, love
White: pure, clean, youthful, mild
● Black: sophistication, elegance, seductiveness, mystery
-- This color reaches the market aged 16 to 25, who are still trying to find their identity. This age
group also relates to the rebelliousness and sophistication of the color.
-- Those who are achievement-oriented and ambitious favor black as well. Add a pop of color to
black, and you’ll have a strong message displayed.
● Gold: prestige, expense
● Silver: prestige, cold, scientific, calming, soothing, patience
-- Great for science and technology, but also good for sleek, lustrous packaging. Great for
feminine products.
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6
Put It Together for the Greatest Impact
The visual sense is the strongest, and research shows that 90% of an assessment for trying out a
product is made by color alone. Since market research shows that color affects shopping habits,
if you were trying to reach impulse shoppers, you would probably include red-orange colors,
black, and royal blue.
If your typical market includes shoppers who are budget-conscious, then you would want to
choose colors such as pink, teal, light blue, and navy.
So, if you were selling children’s books, you would want to design them in bold, primary colors.
However, if you were marketing them to grandparents, you would create the brochures to appeal
to them by using blues (trust), pinks (nurturing, sweet), yellow (cheer, happiness), and so forth.
Our printing firm is qualified to help you choose colors that complement each other and that will
help you elicit the response you want from your potential clients.
We look forward to serving you and helping your business far exceed its potential through your
printed pieces.
703.444.5555
AllegraDulles.com